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Duke City Shootout Film Sets 2006-2008

The Digital Filmmaking Institute puts on the Duke City Shootout film festival each year. It starts as a script contest. The best seven scripts are then made into short films during the festival. The writers are brought in and given crew and equipment to make their films. The all volunteer crew range from union professionals to students. A panel of celebrity judges pick the best film and we have a premier where the awards are given out. Here's the first three films I took part in.

Mr. Fletcher's Yard Sale

Duke City Shootout - 2008

I chose this as my favorite script because if was a cute sci-fi story and I knew I could do the sets well. Little did I know I would wind up having three key positions with no full-time assistants. That amounted to me being three departments by myself: Art, Set Dressing, and Props. Luckily our writer/director had detailed storyboards. We had fun, but we could have done much better with a larger cast and crew.

We only had three sets for this film, all shot at the same house. It starts in the kitchen of one of the boys, after a sleep-over, then they set up a lemonade stand and their neighbor across-the-street, Mr Fletcher, sets up a yard sale. What happens next is pure science fiction. Mr Fletcher's Yard Sale Kitchen set.

Mr Fletcher's Yard Sale Lemonade Stand set.

Mr Fletcher's Yard Sale Yard Sale set.

Young Gun

Duke City Shootout - 2007

We had a terrific crew for this one, because of the veteran team of Anthony Nickols - 1st AD, Darlene Hansen - Producer and Michael Flowers - Art Director.

The story is a morality play about the negative influence of violent video games.

Our young hitman lived in an ill-kept mobile home, with poor supervision. We got the use of an empty mid-80's mobile that had structural damage, but was a nice home in it's day. Our challenge was to dress it down.

Young Gun

Our beleagered husband lived in an upscale house. The house we used belongs to our Prop Mistress and needed little work since she's a natural decorator. The most we did was to the guest bedroom for the scene exposing his wife's affair.

Young Gun Bedroom set

The husband met with a hitman and drowned his sorrows at a strip club. We used a club that had been shut down. The challenge here was to make it look active and attractive even though it had been stripped (pardon the pun) of most of it's carpet and mirrors.

Young Gun Strip Club set

The husband tracked his wife to her lover's office. We used the downtown studio of a local photographer who our Art Director knows. We were lucky to find she had lenses in the outside walls and viewscreens showing cool, live views of the street below. This made for the perfect high-tech background for our simple high-tech office.

Young Gun Office set

Find out more on IMDb.

Maklar, Anyone?

Duke City Shootout - 2006

My first Shootout. We had a great script, a fun little sci-fi about fans of a Star Trek type TV show having a fan club meeting and discovering something about one of the members. We had a lot of fun shooting this, but if it were up to me we'd have put in much more set dressing.

It was set in the home of our club leader that was built and decorated in the 1970's and never updated. The characters were convention going fanatics and the refreshments were all given other planetary names. One character was a holigram so we shot his part with a green screen.

Maklar, Anyone? buffet set.

Watch Maklar, Anyone? on You Tube.

Find out more on IMDb.

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